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Comment by andyfilms1 | Hacker News Reader

Interesting, her videos have never struck me as contrarian for the sake of it, she seems genuinely frustrated at a lack of substantial progress in physics and the plethora of garbage papers. Though I imagine it must be annoying to be a physicist and have someone constantly telling you you're not good enough, but that itself is kind of part of the scientific process too.

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My biggest complaint is sometimes it seems like she will take some low quality paper and just dunk on it. This feels a bit click-baity/strawman-y if nobody was being convinced by the paper in the first place

[I am not a physicist so probably can't really evaluate the whole thing neutrally]

What's the downside of that? Shouldn't a bit of public criticality help raise the publication standards?

Attacking your opponent's weakest argument is easy. Attacking their strong arguments is what takes skill.

If the paper is getting a lot of press that is one thing, but if its languishing in obscurity, it just feels a bit self-indulgant

It sounds like you're saying that her opponents are the entirety of physics researchers in academia. But isn't it that her opponents are those particular researchers that are publishing poor work, and that she's attacking the strongest arguments of those? Or am I missing something?

And I don't accept the "languishing in obscurity" argument - if a published work is poor, we should still critique it (by publishing a letter to the editorial, or any other manner), rather than just let it pollute the space. There have been many cases of obscure works being picked up decades hence, and especially now with AI "deep research", it's easier and easier for bad work to slip in - so I believe that science communicators should do what they can to add the appropriate commentary to such works. And if it seems like "easy" work, then all the better.

The issue is that many of her videos argue that funding for particle physics should instead go into foundations and interpretations of quantum mechanics, specifically research completely identical to what she works on.

This is not helped by the fact that she pushes an interpretation of quantum mechanics viewed as fringe at best. Her takes on modern physics seem typically disingenuous or biased.

Could she be correct in her assertion? Are we spending more on areas of physics which don’t require it?

She's correct. If you want theory of everything energy you need accelerator the size of our Solar system. Source: Stephen Hawking's Universe in a nutshell.

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